Some “experts” helpfully inform us that Saddam is trying to stall. Whatever would we do without experts?

The human shields are suffering severe attrition in the Balkans and Turkey, from lack of funds, unity and leadership. Some choice bits, for those who don’t want to register for the Times of London:

The rows started almost as soon as the group left London a fortnight ago, with arguments over which routes to take. A black bus owned by Ken Nichols O?Keefe, 33, a tattooed former US marine and Gulf war veteran, and full of young firebrands, drove through Germany ? with a sightseeing stop-off at Dachau concentration camp ? to Italy even though the vehicle was too tall for the Alpine tunnels and scraped its roof.

Another bus, one of the lumbering Routemasters owned by Letts, drove through France and waited for Nichols O?Keefe in Milan.

The tension was compounded when a group of Italian peace campaigners in designer clothes joined the Britons, many of whom are elderly activists wearing hippie-style clothes and cooking lentils aboard the buses.

Lentils, eh? Hmmm…are they plotting a little gas warfare of their own?

Instead of heading towards their objective, the peaceniks took a detour to Rome last Sunday for sightseeing.

In addition to taking detours on the excellent adventure, some of the cadres are insufficiently worshipful of their supreme leader.

Most of them eventually caught a ferry to Greece, but Nichols O?Keefe and a handful of others stayed behind with a stricken bus before flying to join the others. He was promptly detained in Istanbul and deported back to Italy.

He has angered other peaceniks by planning to meet Saddam on his arrival in Baghdad. At least five have returned home rather than deal with him and a Welsh couple have set out to reach the Iraqi capital on their own.

?People have got so fed up with him that they have dropped out,? said Letts. Nichols O?Keefe was dubbed ?the messiah? and ?Gandhi? by his less-than- enthusiastic fellow travellers. He had warned them any breakdowns ?would be the work of the CIA?.

Ahhh…the psyops is working.

He is being held this weekend in an Italian jail and is facing deportation to the United States. His mother, Pat, who is continuing on the journey to Baghdad, said: ?That would be the very worst outcome. It would be a disaster for him.?

Yes, and a tragedy for the burgeoning peace movement as well.

Hilarious.

Many participants are concerned they will run short of money and are unhappy at the prospect of a compulsory HIV test on the Iraqi border, about which they were not warned until this weekend.

?We are buying our own hypodermic syringes?, said Williams. ?They could just as easily give you HIV with the needles in Iraq.?

Yes, American smart bombs are one thing, but they didn’t think they’d have to face those brutal Iraqi needles…

The human shields are suffering severe attrition in the Balkans and Turkey, from lack of funds, unity and leadership. Some choice bits, for those who don’t want to register for the Times of London:

The rows started almost as soon as the group left London a fortnight ago, with arguments over which routes to take. A black bus owned by Ken Nichols O?Keefe, 33, a tattooed former US marine and Gulf war veteran, and full of young firebrands, drove through Germany ? with a sightseeing stop-off at Dachau concentration camp ? to Italy even though the vehicle was too tall for the Alpine tunnels and scraped its roof.

Another bus, one of the lumbering Routemasters owned by Letts, drove through France and waited for Nichols O?Keefe in Milan.

The tension was compounded when a group of Italian peace campaigners in designer clothes joined the Britons, many of whom are elderly activists wearing hippie-style clothes and cooking lentils aboard the buses.

Lentils, eh? Hmmm…are they plotting a little gas warfare of their own?

Instead of heading towards their objective, the peaceniks took a detour to Rome last Sunday for sightseeing.

In addition to taking detours on the excellent adventure, some of the cadres are insufficiently worshipful of their supreme leader.

Most of them eventually caught a ferry to Greece, but Nichols O?Keefe and a handful of others stayed behind with a stricken bus before flying to join the others. He was promptly detained in Istanbul and deported back to Italy.

He has angered other peaceniks by planning to meet Saddam on his arrival in Baghdad. At least five have returned home rather than deal with him and a Welsh couple have set out to reach the Iraqi capital on their own.

?People have got so fed up with him that they have dropped out,? said Letts. Nichols O?Keefe was dubbed ?the messiah? and ?Gandhi? by his less-than- enthusiastic fellow travellers. He had warned them any breakdowns ?would be the work of the CIA?.

Ahhh…the psyops is working.

He is being held this weekend in an Italian jail and is facing deportation to the United States. His mother, Pat, who is continuing on the journey to Baghdad, said: ?That would be the very worst outcome. It would be a disaster for him.?

Yes, and a tragedy for the burgeoning peace movement as well.

Hilarious.

Many participants are concerned they will run short of money and are unhappy at the prospect of a compulsory HIV test on the Iraqi border, about which they were not warned until this weekend.

?We are buying our own hypodermic syringes?, said Williams. ?They could just as easily give you HIV with the needles in Iraq.?

Yes, American smart bombs are one thing, but they didn’t think they’d have to face those brutal Iraqi needles…

The human shields are suffering severe attrition in the Balkans and Turkey, from lack of funds, unity and leadership. Some choice bits, for those who don’t want to register for the Times of London:

The rows started almost as soon as the group left London a fortnight ago, with arguments over which routes to take. A black bus owned by Ken Nichols O?Keefe, 33, a tattooed former US marine and Gulf war veteran, and full of young firebrands, drove through Germany ? with a sightseeing stop-off at Dachau concentration camp ? to Italy even though the vehicle was too tall for the Alpine tunnels and scraped its roof.

Another bus, one of the lumbering Routemasters owned by Letts, drove through France and waited for Nichols O?Keefe in Milan.

The tension was compounded when a group of Italian peace campaigners in designer clothes joined the Britons, many of whom are elderly activists wearing hippie-style clothes and cooking lentils aboard the buses.

Lentils, eh? Hmmm…are they plotting a little gas warfare of their own?

Instead of heading towards their objective, the peaceniks took a detour to Rome last Sunday for sightseeing.

In addition to taking detours on the excellent adventure, some of the cadres are insufficiently worshipful of their supreme leader.

Most of them eventually caught a ferry to Greece, but Nichols O?Keefe and a handful of others stayed behind with a stricken bus before flying to join the others. He was promptly detained in Istanbul and deported back to Italy.

He has angered other peaceniks by planning to meet Saddam on his arrival in Baghdad. At least five have returned home rather than deal with him and a Welsh couple have set out to reach the Iraqi capital on their own.

?People have got so fed up with him that they have dropped out,? said Letts. Nichols O?Keefe was dubbed ?the messiah? and ?Gandhi? by his less-than- enthusiastic fellow travellers. He had warned them any breakdowns ?would be the work of the CIA?.

Ahhh…the psyops is working.

He is being held this weekend in an Italian jail and is facing deportation to the United States. His mother, Pat, who is continuing on the journey to Baghdad, said: ?That would be the very worst outcome. It would be a disaster for him.?

Yes, and a tragedy for the burgeoning peace movement as well.

Hilarious.

Many participants are concerned they will run short of money and are unhappy at the prospect of a compulsory HIV test on the Iraqi border, about which they were not warned until this weekend.

?We are buying our own hypodermic syringes?, said Williams. ?They could just as easily give you HIV with the needles in Iraq.?

Yes, American smart bombs are one thing, but they didn’t think they’d have to face those brutal Iraqi needles…

Mark Whittington has a nice Columbia follow up in the Houston Chronicle.

Contrary to what I wrote in my Fox column (and this post), Petr’s drawing of the earth seen from the Moon was not destroyed in last weekend’s Shuttle disaster. Ramon didn’t take the original–it was a copy.

[Via Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, who also has links to tributes to Kalpana Chawla]

Tom over at the Alleywriter asks:

Why wasn?t the flight of the Columbia aborted immediately after that piece of foam struck the craft?s wing? There is, supposedly, always at least two locations set up for emergency landing of the shuttle in case of just such a problem.

The only answer I can come up with is money. It costs a lot of money to get a shuttle mission off. It takes a lot of time and a lot of preparation. Some pencil-necked engineer put money ahead of safety and it cost us a shuttle and 7 astronauts. His penny-pinching has cost far more than a dozens of aborted missions.

I love all these Monday-morning quarterbacks. Particularly when they don’t even understand the rules of the game.

Tom, just because you can’t come up with any other answer doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

Consider the possibility that a) they didn’t know if the damage was a problem, since this had happened before with no problems, b) aborts are extremely risky, and have never been even attempted, let alone successfully completed and, most importantly, c) they didn’t know about the insulation hitting the vehicle until the next day, after it was already in orbit, because they only found out by reviewing launch films.

In any event, “dozens of aborted missions” would in fact cost much more than the loss of an orbiter and crew, particularly when one considers that at least some of those aborts would probably result in loss of vehicle in themselves, but even without considering that, it would come to many billions of dollars in reflights and ISS program delays.

He also thinks that NASA warned people away from debris because parts of the Shuttle are “classified.” This is nonsense. The entire Shuttle design is in the public domain. The only thing that was sensitive was the standard box used for encryption for communications, which, if found, might give someone an idea of exactly how we encrypt data, and thus help them break it.

Consider instead the possibility that NASA didn’t want the public tampering with key evidence, and perhaps ruining the investigation, which again, is the reality.

I wish that people would read the damned FAQ, instead of indulging in ignorant speculation and conspiratorial fantasies.

Based on this article from the news agency that can’t call a terrorist a terrorist, I have to add a couple new (synonymous) phrases to the glossary.

“unilateral” or “on their own“:

Taking action with a large number of nations in a coalition, but without Kofi Annan’s permission.

John McCaslin at the WaPo has one of the last emails from William McCool before Columbia began its fatal descent:

“PS ? As I write, we just experienced a sunset over the Pacific, just [west] of Chile. I’m sitting on the flight deck in the CDR seat (front right) with a view of the Earth moving gracefully by. Sunsets and sunrises from space come every 45 minutes, and last only about 30 seconds, but the colors are stunning. In a single view, I see looking out at the edge of the Earth ? red at the horizon line, blending to orange, then yellow; followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue, then various gradually darker shades of gray, then black with a million stars above. It’s breath-taking.”

Yet many people still believe that no one would pay for such an experience.

[via Betsy Newmark]

Daniel Greenberg has a good summary of the problem with Shuttle and station over at the WaPo today.

It’s all basically correct, but I want to comment on this one point.

Dating from 1981 to 1999, the surveys, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, found that between 9 and 18 percent of respondents during those years believed that the government spent “too little” on space exploration, while 39 to 52 percent felt it spent “too much.” Far ahead of space exploration, spending preferences were expressed for “reducing pollution,” “improving health care” and “improving education.”

I’d be willing to bet that a large number of those respondents who think we are spending too much haven’t a clue how much we’re spending. My experience with such polls is that large numbers of people think that we spend much more on NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, than we actually do. Very few people are aware that it’s less than a percent. I’d be interested to see if those numbers change if you poll people after telling them that.

Of course, the issue is not how much we’re spending, but how (and how poorly) we’re spending it. NASA has had more than enough money to make great progress in space over the past few decades–hundreds of billions in current-year dollars. But they haven’t had the philosophy, will, or political permission to spend it sensibly, at least if our goal was to create a space-faring civilization.